Soul Path Sessions
Soul Path Sessions
Soul Integration
The Soul Path Sessions podcast will be taking a summer break after this episode! If you have not listened to any of our previous conversations, please check them out. We look forward to resuming our Soul Path Journey together in the Fall of 2022. Thank you for listening!
Deborah and Brenda discuss the process of integration as we get older and how we use our intentions to create the possibility of becoming someone more attuned to our own soul, someone completely different than we use to be. At a certain point, nobody cares what you become. You are now the one in charge of you! How great is that? The pressure to maintain who you were has dissolved into who you want to be, or who you truly are. It is a state of absolute freedom and being able to integrate all you are into all you do, is our best expression of soul.
Welcome to the Soul Path Sessions podcast with Deborah Meints-Pierson and Brenda Littleton. Brenda is an educator and counselor rooted in Jungian and eco psychology. She helps her clients understand the importance of the mind, body, spirit, and earth relationship for healing. Deborah is a licensed psychotherapist and has been trained in traditional and sacred psychology, exploring from the ground up what makes our human experience meaningful, wholesome and enlightening. Deborah and Brenda invite you to accompany them on a soul path journey as they explore the possibilities of living a more soulful life, as therapists, seekers, and lovers of fate.
Brenda:Welcome back to Soul Path Sessions. And we're gonna open up with the notion of integration. Yeah. Yeah.
Deborah:How do you become somebody new? We were talking in our last, I, I think this is our 10th. I think we're celebrating our 10th podcast. Just thank you. Um, which I'm proud of us cuz you know, we're integrating, we're bringing into our lives, a dream. We had a couple months ago, uh, to do a podcast and look at we're doing it now. Yeah. Thank
Brenda:You for inviting me.
Deborah:Yeah. So we're integrating and integrating really means putting it on the calendar.<laugh>, you know, make a date with destiny, you know, uh, so many people say I'm gonna write a book. I mean, everybody tells me they're gonna write a book. I'm like write, well, write the book, sit down, integrate that into your identity. Mm-hmm<affirmative> do this very simple thing. And this is really important when we're reinventing ourselves, as we get older and some of us feel less useful or less relevant. Um, this can happen at any stage of life, but it kind of ties into our last show. You're now in charge of you, maybe nobody really cares what you become, how great is that?
Brenda:And the pressure to maintain who you were, has dissolved into, who do you want to be? Or who
Deborah:Are you? Right. I mean, you're completely free. I mean, one level is the terror yeah. Of irrelevance. And nobody really cares and you're not turning heads on the street. The way I used to. And the other one is this absolute freedom to create what you wanna create. Look at what you wanna look at, become what you wanna become and create a date with destiny, which now reminds me that a poem is coming on. Yeah. Um, and the poem just appeared. It's one from, I believe she's a Welsh poet, um, floor Adcock. And she wrote this and I think around her sixties and she was um, uh, vacationing in the hill country in, in, uh, I think it was in England. And she's just at that age where you've just turned that corner and you realize, oh, I'm an old person. And so we have salt. We, you know, we are used to being looked at. So this poem is all about looking out. And so it's called weathering by flora. Ock uh, retired, a librarian literal, literally thin skinned. I suppose my face catches the wind off the Snowline and flushes with a flush that will never holy settle. Well, that was a metropolitan vanity wanting to look young, forever to pass. Yes. I was never a pre-app Rite beauty or anything, but pretty enough to satisfy men who need to be seen with passable women. But now I'm in love with a place which doesn't care how I look or if I'm happy, happy is how I look. That's all my hair will grow gray in any case, my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken and the years work all their usual changes. If my face is to be weather beaten as well, that's little enough lost a fair bargain for a year among the lakes and fells. When simply to look out of my window at the pass, makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what my soul may wear over its new complexion to simply to look out my window at the high pass and make me indifferent to mirrors and to wet my soul. And I wear over its new complexion.
Brenda:Yeah. A whole new awareness.
Deborah:Mm-hmm<affirmative> the idea that we're looking out, not being looked at as much. Yeah. Is really kind of cool. Yeah. It's a incredible freedom. A lot of people like to be invisible. They choose. Do you wanna fly or do you wanna be invisible? A lot of people choose invisibility. Yeah. You can get around.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Deborah:You can look
Brenda:Out. And there's a lot of, I mean, at least for, for whatever reason, I still think, you know, when once 60 is reached, there's two, maybe three decades. I mean that's a long time when you, when you go back three decades and think of yourself as 30 mm-hmm<affirmative> standing at 60 thinking of yourself at 90, that's a lot of territory of living under harsh, personal inner concerns of I'm not my 40 year old anymore. Yeah. That's a long time to weather that storm.
Deborah:Mm-hmm<affirmative> yeah, it is. And it, it takes a lot of forbearance. You know, this is an old fashioned word, like an old ship. That's just able to ride this stormy, see and just know it's gonna be like that. And, and so many times really older people and always all my life been attracted to older people like they're travelers and they're ahead of this. And they say this too, shall pass. They always say this or that's just the way it goes.
Brenda:The time will tell.
Deborah:I will tell they have these things that, yeah. Their adages, I may, uh, sound simplistic, but it's actually true this too shall pass. Yeah. And how, and you will ride through this and I'm not saying I'll always write through it gracefully, but there is a sense of vision in those who age. Well,
Brenda:My dad was a boat builder and I grew up in the west coast of British Columbia on the west coast of Vancouver island in very torrential, weathered rained, soaked world. And there's a word of a boat that will take you out to sea and bring you back safely, weathering all storms and it's called scum. Mm. And I love that word, me too, scum mm-hmm<affirmative>. And um, and I'm beginning to understand what it means to Beku them as a person to be a schoolum person.
Deborah:Ugh.<laugh> I like that. I like to be AUM person. I'm not always, sometimes I'm just a shipwrecked. Yeah.<laugh> you know, it's just,
Brenda:But you still make it back home. You,
Deborah:You make it, it's just that idea of endurance. Um, yeah. This ability to also live more presently, um, to see what's happening in the room integration in our last show, we were talking about there's these four parts that come from the book that you've been reading. Um, the inner work of soul, I believe is the name of the book. Um, um,
Brenda:The inner work of age, shifting from soul, from role to soul by Connie Zig mm-hmm<affirmative>. And, um, I've been listening to an audible version of it as I walk and which I think is a wonderful metaphor as I'm walking toward aging and walking in aging, walking with her words. Yeah. And, um, she's a depth psychologist. So she brings in, um, a lot of challenges and metaphors that, that are easily found. And, um, I highly recommend the book. Um,
Deborah:I like her idea of you must have the pay attention to what you want.
Brenda:Those were my words. Oh, that that came from my, um,
Deborah:I like your words
Brenda:<laugh> well, I was, I'm reading her book, but I also went to Oak Creek in Sedona and there's a particular, uh, jumping, uh, like a, uh, swimming hole that I jump in where the current is pretty strong and surprisingly strong that when I, when I jump in and I surface, I'm a good 30 feet, 40 feet down river from where I jumped in within a few seconds. Mm-hmm<affirmative> like, it's a pretty rapid pace right there. Yeah. And I jump in fully expecting that I have to exert myself mm-hmm<affirmative> and um, I've lived life of, for on again, off off, again, just receiving what comes to me. Mm-hmm,<affirmative>, it's pretty impressive. And I'm very grateful and challenged to meet the moment, but it is a different way to be in the world when you exert yourself. And it's not from an ego extent as it is. This is what my soul wants me to do. Mm-hmm<affirmative> like, it doesn't want me to die in this river.<laugh>
Deborah:Yeah.
Brenda:Is this it? No, not yet. Mm-hmm<affirmative> um, so intention making the intention paying attention to,
Deborah:But you have to pay a lot of attention when the water's moving that quickly. Yeah. You have to really be in the moment. I,
Brenda:I worked up a sweat, even though I was in water mm-hmm<affirmative> to get back out of the,
Deborah:To go upstream.
Brenda:Yeah. To go upstream mm-hmm<affirmative> yeah. Yeah. So having, so I'm practicing now, um, I'm, I'm articulating the practice. I'm putting it into four steps for myself as I'm making new patterns for my next 40 years or perhaps 30. Um, and, and, and listening to my older self, um, making the intention, paying attention at least once, twice, three times a day to that intention. Mm-hmm<affirmative> when I hit the wall and I figure out, I don't really wanna do that. It's like extending myself going beyond the norm. Mm-hmm<affirmative> the feeling what's comfortable. Yeah. Like being really uncomfortable with it. Like
Deborah:Really? Yeah. That birthing process. We've talked about
Brenda:The conception and yeah. Yeah. The conception like continually practicing conception.
Deborah:It's the birthing that hurts not the conceiving
Brenda:<laugh>. And then, so then going beyond my norm, which is extension mm-hmm<affirmative> and then integrating it.
Deborah:Yeah. And to, and to redefine yourself, I love your ritual on your birthday. Mine was to go to a vortex that I go to every year in Boham canyon. And I was going along humm, dumbing kind of picking my way. It's a little bit treacherous. And, um, up ahead of me was this woman who was just wobbling around, you know, much older than me. And she had this little old dog that was quite muscular, intentional, and she had a couple walking sticks and I looked at her and I thought, geez, she's gonna fall right off the edge here.<laugh> but she just sort of found a way to rewrite herself. And we started to talk and she was telling me she was good, 10 years older than me. And I'm she does this walk. And she's, she actually walked from the beginning of the trail, which I had just come in mid trail and her little dog Jeffrey was ahead of her that she was such a gift to me. I mean, we got to this one part where I was literally boosting her feet up, so she could go vertical and trying to avoid a prickly pair cactus. And when we got to the top, I on very wobbly legs covered with red soil sat, cuz I, this was my personal challenge to get to the top of the vortex, sat down and drank water. And I looked at her and she just went walking past me and joined another group of like roster kids and her little dog.
Brenda:So, so you met the older Dorothy in todo
Deborah:<laugh>
Brenda:<laugh>
Deborah:I mean, it just was so funny. I just was saying, this is my birthday present this year. Yeah. Because she was so ahead of where, and then she had been telling me I'm gonna go to the Dells. I'm gonna do this every day of the week. She goes walking. Wow. And she just finds that inner balance. So I pushed myself to walk before<laugh> and then I watched her and she's gone beyond me. And of course, some of this is luck cuz you know, some of us fall down and can't walk forever again. But um, like you, I like to do something on my birthday that pushes me and says something about my year mm-hmm<affirmative> and it was on, on my birthday two years before, uh, the beginning of the pandemic. I did not know it was the beginning of the pandemic cuz it was February, 2020 when a poem hit me in the head and I had to go in and write it. So I paid attention. My intention on that birthday was to, to come back to my creative roots, writing, dancing, and I'm just sitting there minding my own business and this poem comes to me and I just have to go and write it. So
Brenda:This is a poem that's coming out
Deborah:From my book shelter in place.
Brenda:That's coming out soon.
Deborah:Yeah. So to be yeah, coming out soon. Um, so this is, I was sitting watching in the early morning, uh, sitting outside and I just saw a Hawk and this is the poem awakening and this beauty knocks hard on the door of my heart, the mind and its designs are too small for this moment. Your frame of reference is snow frame at all. Those, those lines were actually delivered to me. Mm-hmm<affirmative> your frame of reference is no frame at all. An updraft holds the Hawk high and still between the canyon walls. Where are you going? Except as quiet as you're awakening.
Brenda:Oh that's beautiful. Yeah.
Deborah:And uh,
Brenda:So the frame, meaning not a frame. So it's too contained. It's beyond the containment.
Deborah:Yeah. I didn't know what I did not know what the line was when I received it. I was just watching the Hawk on the updraft mm-hmm<affirmative> and when that line came the mind and its designs, the ego mine are too small for this moment. Your frame of like your new frame of reference is no frame at all. Right?
Brenda:It's it's it's boundless.
Deborah:Yeah. And this, uh, book that this little book has been for me, um, surprising, cuz it arrived, the invitation was the intention was set. The invitation arrived. I accepted the invitation. I paid attention to it, extended myself to get off my butt mm-hmm<affirmative> and get something to write with and catch it shaking with the intensity of catching it. Its awards fell into place, crafting it, uh, telling people about it. Uh, having my daughter edit it with me, which has been delightful of finding the pictures to go in it. Uh, and now we're in the final edit. Yeah. And then organizing some events around it.
Brenda:And so the integration is being, um, it's, it's living as well as you're sharing it here and you're sharing it in, in these other activities.
Deborah:I'm thrilled because I started off as a poet when I was young, it saved my life. The poet saved my life after my dad's death suicide. It was the poets who could name say, speak of the unspeakable
Brenda:Mm-hmm
Deborah:<affirmative> and name it so well in their own grief and their own finding. And so that was my doorway. That was my portal that I put away pretty much for the 30 years I was raising kids. Mm-hmm<affirmative>
Brenda:So moving from role to soul in allowing the sense of soul to take up the landscape that had been abdicated or released by ego, um, has brought to you this renewed relationship with writing poetry.
Deborah:Yes. It's actually writing me writing. Yeah. And allowing it to stir me because what I'm noticing and this isn't just about poetry, but most artistic expression or what we must do, it comes like it generally comes when there's a lot of feeling going on and we are feeling creatures.
Brenda:So it, it helps organize the
Deborah:Feeling. It helps honor honor the feeling so often I know my daughter's an English teacher and she talks about working in the schools and my son also works in the schools. Um, and kids needed this expression for all that's going on inside. I sometimes wonder if kids were given paintbrush or pen or drumstick, whether they pick up guns or not. I don't know. But my sense is they need to express something powerfully mm-hmm<affirmative> and, and if it doesn't get expressed through the arts or through movement, it may turn into pure evil mm-hmm<affirmative> and I, I see this in older people too evil in an older person, no, it's gonna sound like I'm calling people who do nothing evil, but it's evil to themselves. They sit and watch the news all day
Brenda:Harm to themselves. They
Deborah:Do harm to themselves. They sit and watch the news all day, which is meant to pumble them with the worst possible things while scrolling something else across the bottom of the screen. And
Brenda:I never do. I just, you can't understand that one, the words don't match up with what is being said. Yeah.
Deborah:It's it's like two brains and then the colors are too bright and I don't care who you're, which side you're on, but it it's. I know it does evil to oneself and, and it, and it, and my experience is when people, if you turn off the TV, there's like this, this deafening void. And um, and it's also this invitation to feel the losses that have mounted and getting older and being isolated and not being involved in work and to really engage with life. Again, a lot of my clients are on a fast media, fast, as much as possible just to go outside, put your feet in the dirt, you know, bang the go, you know, tell me what you did in high school. You tell me before you leave, what was it was, um, oh, I'm trying to think of her name. Um, Jamie Lee Curtis. She was saying that my great fear is not dying, but it's dying without doing anything. Mm. And the void, the void. Yeah. So she started production company. She's doing movies. She says, I, I don't have time to be afraid of things. My biggest fear is that I will like to quote Wayne Dyer die with the music in me. Right. So this is the invitation. You could do it. You can do what you want. Maybe you have to do it a little differently. Maybe it's pickleball and not tennis, maybe it's, but it's gonna be something that you can move your body again,
Brenda:Express. So moving out of that rule, I have a propensity to believe that the rule is given to us. It's like something we comply with. Whereas that's what use is for the twenties, thirties, and forties. And then that transition decade of figuring out this is not really who I am. This is not everything. There's more. And then from 60 on, uh, pivoting and allowing out that, which has been politely, quietly waiting in the corner pocket of one's hallway.
Deborah:It ha I mean, I can remember as a young mother just like crying because I couldn't play my piano or my guitar, or, or really do much of anything expressive. And I, my worst days I loved being a mom, but on my worst days, it was like, it was all about their creativity. It was all about their, their stuff. And, and<laugh>, in fact, I remember my oldest son is an artist. He said he moved from oil painting to, uh, music. And I kept giving him paint. And he said, if you like paint so much, why don't you get it for yourself? Yeah.
Brenda:Yeah. Our projections and giving to others. That's really what we want to have given to ourselves. Well,
Deborah:I found out like he, he left his paints there and he said, if you like music so much, what did you play it? I mean, it was a great handoff. Yeah. Because I just, and my daughter, when she went to college, I said, what will become, you know, you're gonna go and what will I do? And she goes, get a life<laugh> and the mirror, well, she, the mirror, but it was great because it was devastating. Yeah. In that word means to render your clothing. You're so dev and I, you know, wait a minute, who did I leave behind all those years ago? I've gotta find that person that, and, and she's a mystery to me, but she has something to do with what I cared about when I was younger.
Brenda:I had this moment of reconciliation with myself on dealing with all of my neurosis and griefs and, and went back to, um, uh, a picture that I, I had to imagine because I, I had yet to be there. It was when my parents decided that they wanted to bring in another child, you know, bring in a child. And, and so this, the art of conception I'm fascinated by, um, and how can we've, we've all had to experience that we were all conceived and, and how can we like I'm, I don't have any words. I don't have a plan for this, but I am intrigued by how can we reconceive ourselves? Okay. So that's a cue because somebody wrote a poem.<laugh>, that's true. But I, but as I, as I read my poem of conception, I wrote it to launch, uh, a chapter on how can we reconceive ourselves. And part of this is, you know, the shadowy part of remembering who we are. Mm-hmm<affirmative>, um, allowing out that, which as I keep referring to has been quietly politely waiting in the dark hallways, waiting for that to be invited back. Cuz I don't think it's about as remembering, I, I really do full circle tour. Yeah. Full circle tour. I like that. So this is conception. And so as I read it, keep in mind, I, I guess I would like their, the listener to think about their own conception. Mm okay. Conception. I found this deep, deep space where sleep converts to soil, the kind of soil that when I take an initial whiff, the biome snaps part of the brain back a few thousand years to where a bird song erupts behind the left eye. And I know something important and lost has found me and suddenly the outer rings of all my decisions immediately remember, although they truly never really ever completely quite forgot that all the next steps, all the past choices, all the regrets, all the broken promises and those that were for ever forgotten, broken promises to myself. Yes. All of those avalanches of well purposed anxieties, compensations of hives in HES as acid force overwhelms about money, men manias and urial lunges at joy of not bathing any part of me for days or those obsessive nights of chasing Orion across the sky until Dawn came to fetch my part of the bargain, the agreement where I show up for some obligation made important just for the moment, all of that stuff. And all of those histories, most difficult to contain in some tight and tidy narrative were actually honed, summoned and gifted from a shared intentional decision, a union between two lovers who journeyed one night in late August to a protected Cove of luscious island soil and said, come, we lay here under the Cedar bow that stretches 30 feet from shore to the shallow lake waters. It is here. Now we bur in wrap together and conceive our first child, a child of this place let's make our way from the thin lipped ledge between form and fluidity. We leave here now as three in E quiver of filaments in a quirk of desire. All these billions of synapses are summoned home. To remember the beginning, to remember the beginning that is in every single continuing moment of additional beginnings that this brings me home to my marrow where 64 years ago, I was one month alive beating wildly humming, low swaying forward like kelp attached motion in and with another living being wounded hosted dreamed about wondered upon anticipated nurtured to be conceived is a wondrous mystery every day, since then is a wondrous mystery. This sleep soil keeps me holy. This deep deep space is my outer womb where I continue to beat wildly. I am the bird song from a thousand years. I am those things important and lost. I am the Cedar bow that stretches 30 feet from shore to shallow waters of lake of island of those forgotten promises made to myself, not broken or unfinished or even lost. I am their intentional conception of place, desire destination. And I finally, I finally understand I will forever live to conceive each new arching moment in this continued unsolved, not resolved thin ledge of form and fluidity. Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, it's just, it's never going to be complete
Deborah:<laugh> and on that note, we'll see you all next time. Thanks for listening.
Announcer:And that concludes this week's episode of the Soul Path Sessions podcast with Deborah Meints-Pierson and Brenda Littleton. If you'd like to hear more about living a more soulful life, please subscribe to our channel on your favorite podcast app and be sure to check out the show notes and links below. For more information from Deborah, visit soulpathsessions.com. And for Brenda, brendalittleton.com. Thank you for listening, and remember to follow your soul, it knows the way.
